The highlands of Ethiopia, especially Tigray, were notorious for their severely degraded land. High population density, unchanged agricultural practices, climate change, the steep topography and intermittent and extreme rainfalls are the main causes of land degradation in the area.

As I was glancing through my twitter feed the other day I run into a Ted Talk on “Why work doesn't happen at work.” Sort of intriguing, I thought, and probably full of good tips for most of us at the Bank Group.

Jason Fried, the talk protagonist, does a lot of thinking about collaboration, productivity and the nature of work. He's the co-founder of 37signals, and co-author of the New York Times-best seller "Rework."

A software entrepreneur, Jason offers some practical suggestions on how we could turn the office into a more productive place. After all, increasing productivity seems crucial to meet the twin goals of reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity.

So, where do you really go when you need to get work done? That’s the question that Jason has been asking people for about 10 years.

"Management is not an intellectually satisfying occupation. It consists of telling people things that you’re not sure about and they don’t want to hear.”

- Andrew Smithers, Chairman and Founder of Smithers & Co., a leading advisor to investment managers on international asset allocation. He has contributed regularly to London Evening Standard, Sentaku Magazine and Nikkei Veritas, and he is the author of several books concerning investment, including his most recent, The Road to Recovery: How and Why Economic Policy Must Change (2013).

NGOs must strive for scale if they want to fulfil their roles as enablers and incubators in striving for development

As small but key players in the social development space, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often worry about scaling up. If you have worked in this space, you’d surely agree that models of development interventions promoted by NGOs often remain small islands of success (if at all they do succeed). NGOs themselves are aware of the limited traction they achieve with policymakers due to their inability to influence or demonstrate change at a larger scale. Also, often organizations that are effective at a certain scale falter as they attempt to grow bigger in size. In this column, I restrict myself to service-delivery organizations—those that work in the areas of livelihoods, basic services, etc.—and not those that are involved in activism or rights-based social mobilization.

One view is that the very nature of a development NGO sometimes limits its ability to grow. The objective of an NGO should be to demonstrate: (1) proof of concept of their model; and (2) that implementing this through a government agency is indeed feasible. The latter is especially important, given that key stakeholders in the sector have by now realized and acknowledged that the state/government is at the forefront of the development battle. Scale is crucial in a country like India—it is expected of organizations that they will demonstrate consistent results over a long period of time, and at the same time, reach out to large numbers of people.

Sitting out in the sun, in the middle of a public school premises, I intently looked at a woman clad in a patchy orange saree carrying a lean child on her lap. It was hard not to wonder whether her bare five years of primary school education really helped her understand public financial management! Indeed I was wrong. It was the sheer urge of entertainment and not curiosity about public financial management that drew her, and many more like her, to the premises of a government owned school in Hazaribaag, near the Beribaad, Mirpur area of Dhaka.

With urbanization in Sri Lanka expected to increase from 20% in 2000 to 60% in 2030, perpetual gridlock, polluted waterways, and smoggy skies could all be potential side effects. However, Managing Cities for Sri Lanka Green Growth, organized by the Urban Development Authority and attended by representatives from all major cities taught me some ways we may mitigate some of the negative effects and create a sustainable urban development through innovative locally driven initiatives.

The workshop introduced the Eco2Cities approach to urban development which looks at helping developing countries achieve ecological and economic sustainability in urban areas. Although all Sri Lankan cities currently face challenges related to poor urban planning, it was enriching to hear some successful and innovative initiatives carried out by certain communities that can be used as examples for others.

How much does management matter for economic performance? Despite a large industry of business schools, consulting firms, and airport books purporting to teach you the secrets of good management over the course of your next flight, the answer until very recently has been “we don’t know”. In a recent review, Chad Syverson goes as far as to say “no potential driving factor of productivity has seen a higher ratio of speculation to empirical study”.

Together with colleagues from Stanford and Berkeley, I have been working for the last couple of years to try and understand how much management matters by means of a randomized experiment among textile factories in India. In common with most firms in developing countries, the firms (with 300 workers on average) we were working with did not collect and analyze data systematically in their factories, had few systems for regular maintenance and quality control, had weak human resource systems for promoting and rewarding good performers, and had little control over inventory levels. The result was a high level of quality defects, large stockpiles of unorganized inventories, and frequent breakdowns of machines. 20 percent of the labor force was occupied solely in checking and repairing defective fabric (see picture).